My guess is that this poster is just meant to illustrate the age of the saga in comparison to TFA - a 40 year old poster achieves this far better than a 20 year old poster could.
However, if they’re only doing a “Standard” screening, RotJ would be more ideal to show to illustrate the films continuation.
Likely, ANH will be the first of the 3D OT showings to follow up AotC and RotS last year.
Unless they’re testing to gauge interest (which honestly is stupid because the general rule of Star Wars is “If you sell it, they will buy”, I think they’d be smart enough to advertise heavily that this is a newly remastered NON-SE version. Fox/Lucas may have not understood or cared, but Disney has always pushed the “fresh from the vaults, newly remastered, anniversary edition” harder than any other company I’ve seen.
As for the 77 with 81 crawl, I think that is highly dependent on how the film is being released. A standalone 40th anniversary edition next year would be a great opportunity for the original crawl. However, if they release an Original Unaltered Trilogy, I think it more likely that we’ll get the 81 crawl (which is all that was available on video for years with minimal complaints). Certainly if they go to the effort of releasing them, I’d hope they put the effort into seamless branching. I personally like the continuity of the 81 crawl better so that one positive piece of the GOUT featuring the 77 was just another negative for me.
also… in defense of us millennials - keep in mind that older generations grew up with only 3 movies. Those movies were heavily advertised by their titles. Star Wars at that point was one movie that was such a huge phenomenon that EVERYONE knew about it. ESB and RotJ didn’t even have to be advertised with the SW title attached because everyone was (or knew someone who was) waiting impatiently for them. For nearly 20 years, whenever you talked about the films, you said SW, ESB, and ROTJ
I was 9 when Phantom Menace came out - and thus began a different Marketing strategy. All you kept hearing was Star Wars: Episode 1. Suddenly “Star Wars” was more ambiguous, especially since everyone was talking about the new movie. “Have you seen the new Star Wars trailer” (because who wants to say Star Wars: Episode 1 every time? and unlike the OT, “The Phantom Menace” was not a title you could say and everyone knew what you meant.)
Then came the other two, with more of the same. To this day, when I say TPM people ask “That’s Episode 1 right?”
With “Star Wars” as a title now more confusing, most people still didn’t jump on the A New Hope bandwagon - the title just never seemed to be incredibly inspired, though the vast majority of us know which film it refers to. Instead, people tried initially to call it Episode IV, but that felt too weird when talking about the original movie. Instead, you started hearing “Star Wars: The Original Movie” and “Star Wars: The First One” (I actually hear this one more often, which is amusing considering the small level of confusion it causes with TPM).
Consider this as well: TFA used the same (or very similar) advertising concept as the OT. The “Episode 7” pushes were kept minimal, returning instead to a focus on the title. Over the last 4 years, I’ve steadily felt “The Force Awakens” become a part of the general population’s consciousness.
So, as a millennial (or close to it), I’ve found the general view of the people I know is the films are thought of as Episode 1, Episode 2, Episode 3, The First One, ESB, RotJ, TFA. Without the luxury of 20 years of practice calling the movie Star Wars, and due to deliberate creative advertising decisions, I think it’s a little unfair to blame us for this.
